Open a terminal and type in:
nvidia-settings &
On the left, click on the "PowerMizer" thing.

Go back to your terminal and type in:
glxgears

Look at the nvidia tool, the performance level should be the maximum available.
Mine is never going higher than 1 (out of 3).

Hmm, in that case, apparently I only have one performance level. The displayed Performance Level is 0, and there's only one level (0, 580MHz NV Clock, 800MHz Memory Clock) listed under the Performance Levels section.

Quote:

PAT is enabled. Was hoping to do without the reboots, but I'll try with it disabled.

Well, it was either PAT being on (I added the nopat kernel option), or the tickless kernel being off (somehow it get deselected, even though I had it enabled before, so I re-enabled it). But it seems to work now.

I had the same issue a while ago and nopat cleared the slowdown for me, I also have a X2 CPU and nvidia 8 series card (8500GT) And that was slowdown in glxgear and games btw....

- Ubuntu's kernel doesn't have pat by default and Fedora's does so it is a likely culprit.

- btw the nopat option is no longer needed for me with 2.6.28 kernel and 180.29 driver - i.e the pat issue no longer effects me.

If the nopat option doesn't fix it for you might it be connected with the way you have installed the Nvidia driver.

I have had issues in the past after installing the nvidia driver manually in Arch linux and Mandriva - i.e not used their distro's package - I believe the issue was a conflict between libGL and the nvidia driver - if any one's interested my solution for arch was to edit the PKGCONFIG file from the nvidia driver from abs .

I really wish some people here wouldn't just let rip at people's post it really helps no one and gives the community a bad name - i've a feeling that certain people here really need to get laid/smoke something green....

I'm running Arch64 on my home desktop with KDE4.2. Since the upgrade from 4.1 the performance of displaying any video content (DVB, avi files etc.) with either mplayer/smplayer or kaffeine (xine-backend) went down the drain. However, I'm not entirely sure if things went wrong due to the update or just around the same time.

I can't really tell what it is, it just feels slow, it starts to stutter (and seems to repeat a couple of frames) every time you click somewhere else on the desktop or do something else like moving a window or opening KRunner. This is anoying because I used to put kaffeine on the second monitor to watch some TV (DVB) while working but I can't do that anymore. The sound plays ok, only displaying the video frames seems to be messed up.

Maybe related to that, I can't use any of kaffeine's deinterlacing algorithms anymore. I have the feeling they look worse than before (more like 256 colors) and they drop the video framerate even further.

I used to have a Nvidia Quadro NVS (which exhibited the problem) but replaced it with a GeForce 9500GT which at first seemed to reduce (but not solve) the problem. However, I have the feeling now that things stayed pretty much the same.

Recently, I played around with glxgears and had to realize that the problem exists there as well. As long as nothing else is happening on the desktop, the window gets updated correctly (although smooth is something else... it's more like the video stuff I described above). But as soon as I click somewhere, open a menu or something glxgears starts to stutter just like video does.

I have TwinView enabled but also tried things without it - no change.
I dropped my old xorg.conf in favor of a new (clean) one - no change.
I tried different video outputs (xv, gl, gl2) - no change.
I enabled/disabled desktop effects - no change.
I tried different driver versions (currently using the 180.29-3 from pacman, but also tried 180.22, .27 and .35 in the past) - no change.
Tried the latest beta (185.13) - no change.
Tried the nopat option - no change either.

The funny thing is that everything else works fine... desktop effects are smooth, even the video performance does not drop (further) when moving the video window itself with transparency and all that stuff.

I'm guessing you have a 64-bit system. The benchmark is a 32-bit binary.

P.S. You don't need openal installed to run the benchmark. It will work just fine, but without sound.

I don't know what which Fedora has, but newer OpenAL versions are named libopenal.so.1, not libopenal.so.0. You can try making a symlink (either in /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib) for libopenal.so.0 to point to libopenal.so.1... most apps should work fine with that. You can also put the symlink in with the other libs Unigine has, if you don't want to make it system-wide.

I had experienced the exact same issue as the OP... passing "nopat" to the kernel has resolved this problem!

Although I haven't used glxgears, disregarding the OP's direct comparison is asinine. I have used a variety of applications (X-Plane is one) that performed better under Ubuntu 8.X than in Fedora 9/10. Nopat is clearly the reason... adding nopat as a kernel argument has fixed the jitter and poor framerate I previously experienced.